NOTE: This satirical piece is rooted in facts. Having been to Australia on tour myself, I also heard the claims of bureaucratic abuse from many of the farmers who attended my talks. While Monckton’s essay has some biting satirical humor in it, laugh at it, but know that the issues he writes about are all too real. – Anthony
Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2013.67: Antipodean climate extremists are going to have a field day with this one. In Australia (where else?) a pedigree Hereford bull has been named “Lord Monckton”. And the Prime Directive forbids me to intervene.
Peter Manuel, who farms many thousands of acres in the Lofty Ranges, became so exasperated with the Natural Resources Management Board of South Australia for interfering with farming that he arranged for Lord Monckton (the real one, that is) to visit the state and give a series of talks to farmers.
Peter is chief executive of Farmers’ and Landowners’ Group Australia (FLAG), which campaigns to defend farmers against the ridiculous environmental over-regulation that is destroying their livelihoods.
Earlier this year, I spent ten days with Peter and his family on their beautiful, impeccably-maintained spread high in the hills above Adelaide. The only way for us jackaroos to cover all the rolling acres and herd the cattle and sheep (in Australia, the word “sheep” is spelt “IPCC”) was on off-road motor-bikes, keeping a sharp eye out for snakes as we thundered across the rock-strewn terrain at speeds that would have been illegal on the roads.
After I had ridden (or slidden) fearlessly after my kind host down a shifting, rock-strewn 60-degree brae that no visitor had dared to attempt before, Peter announced that this year’s best pedigree bull on the farm would be named Lord Monckton, and would make an early appearance at the Adelaide Show.
Australia has more poisonous critters than any other continent – including the spooky, spiky officials of the ever-expanding Natural Resources Management Borg, who now outnumber police officers by a handsome margin in the country districts, where former precinct houses and cop-shops have been Assimilated and are now nests of Borg, dedicated to the eradication of farming throughout South Australia in the name of Saving The Planet against non-existent “global warming”.
Farming is Australia’s biggest business. Or, rather, it was. The number of farms in this vast, desert continent is down by 100,000, and, remarkably, the state of Victoria has already become the first in the Federation to become a net importer of food – in Australia, of all places, where a vast continent the size of Europe feeds a tiny population the size of greater London. Peter Manuel is determined that South Australia shall not be the next net importer of food.
The pretext for the Borg’s cruel attacks on farmers is Agenda 21, the U.N.’s sinister plan for global domination via environmental over-regulation.
The Borg, a universally-hated bureaucracy, are actively putting the U.N.’s nihilistic, anti-irrigation, anti-pesticide, anti-farming, anti-business, anti-environment, anti-population, anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-everything Agenda 21 program into ruthless effect.
During my visit to the Lofty Ranges, Peter introduced me to a local farmer with a shocking story. For weeks bureaucrats with binoculars had hidden behind a shed and spied on his farm. Then, one night at 11 pm, They pounced.
Three of Them drove at the farmer in a pickup truck with a massive roo-bar on the front. He ended up hanging from the bar, with an agonizingly bruised leg. He had to be taken to hospital with bruising, lacerations and post-traumatic stress, and remains in pain to this day.
The Borg got to the police before he did, for he was still crook. They alleged he had driven at Them and not the other way about. Wisely, They did not pursue that allegation, but it was enough to ensure that the police disregarded his allegation against Them.
Instead, They took him to court for unlawfully extracting water from a nearby creek. In his absence – his injuries had rendered him unfit to attend – the rube judge in the local criminal court, on no evidence and taking no account of his condition, savagely fined him $18,000 for allegedly having used water from the creek near his property to irrigate his crop of lucerne on the day of the bureaucrats’ raid.
Fortunately, the farmer neither paid the fine nor did the 320 hours’ community service the hanging judge handed down on learning that he had not paid. Though the judge had inflicted what – even if a real offense had been committed, which it had not – was a flagrantly disproportionate fine, not everyone in the civil service is heartless. The judge’s order was simply ignored. The farmer went unpunished.
Just as well: for he had committed no offense. True, he had extracted water from the creek that day, but he had used it to fill his cattle-troughs. I have seen his permit granting him the lawful right to extract water from the creek for his household and for his cattle.
The court is soon to be asked to set aside its judgment and expunge the victim’s record of this non-offense. It may yet also be asked to issue a summons against the Borg ex proprio motu for conspiracy to attempt to pervert the course of justice and conspiracy to perpetrate wilful misfeasance in a public office.
The farmer who wanted to water his cows is by no means the only victim of the Borg’s regime of terror here in South Australia. Another farmer told me They had used satellite photos to estimate the size of his reservoir.
The dam’s true capacity, when professionally surveyed on the ground, was found to be 6.1 million liters, but their Mickey Mouse method, using satellites monitored by zitty teenagers eating too many Krispy Kreme donuts and doing/drinking too much coke/Coke, had incorrectly overestimated it at 10.2 million liters – a shocking error. The satellites can assess the area of a reservoir but not its depth. The Borg’s rule of thumb is calculated to exaggerate the depth of just about every reservoir.
All reservoirs above a threshold capacity are cripplingly and expensively regulated, allegedly to conserve water. As a result of this incident, farmers all over South Australia with reservoirs that the Borg say are just over the threshold for regulation are now demanding surveys to check Their math. But farmers have to pay for the surveys themselves.
In any event, there is no need for regulation at all. Farmers’ reservoirs represent less than 1% of the land area; and, aside from evaporation, they do not cause a net loss of water flow through the creeks and rivers. For Lord Monckton and his fellow cattle do not so much drink the water as rent it.
While I was in South Australia, at the height of the blazing summer drought, the Borg decided to let out a third of the water in the Mount Bold Reservoir, the only major public dam in South Australia and the main water supply for Adelaide, which is now desperately short of water. You couldn’t make this up.
Of course, They were not billed for the water They used to top up the ocean. Their excuse for this monstrous waste? “To maintain environmental flow”. Yet in the summer months the natural “environmental flow” is vanishingly different from zero. They should have left well alone.
Another farmer who cleared silt from a river on his land to assist the river flow was fined a staggeringly disproportionate $35,000 by the vicious judges, who are in the Board’s pocket and act as though they were in Their pay.
Yet another farmer was told a costly water-meter had to be fitted to his borehole, so he could be charged for using his own water, even though water used for his household and his cattle is by law exempt from any charges. No one had been to read the meter ever since its installation several years previously.
Another farmer who had annoyed the Borg by refusing to comply with an unlawful attempt to enforce upon him a regulation that did not apply to him, was told: “We can fine you for shifting a rock.”
Bullying notices along the roadsides here tell passers-by that they must not touch or disturb soil or vegetation at all. Presumably people are expected to hover a few inches above the ground. But most of the population are not Catholic, so they cannot do that. So going for a walk in the countryside is now illegal in much of South Australia.
The Borg are ordering farmers all across South Australia to plant thorny weeds all along the road verges: and Their reason is that “some clusters of acacia paradoxa will protect the river banks from kangaroo intrusion.” The kangaroos, an indigenous species, were here long before the Borg. But now, in the name of saving the natural environment, the natural environment and its iconic symbols, They are out to destroy the kangaroos.
Planting acacia paradoxa is a bad idea. Only bureaucratic panty-waists who have never ridden a farm bike would have thought it up. Spiny acacia is also known as the kerosene bush. As its name implies, it catches fire explosively. The bushes planted on the Borg’s orders will help bush fires to spread. One farmer put it to me bluntly: “That’s what the Agenda 21 maniacs want. They want to burn us out and drive us off our land forever.”
He is right. I have spoken to a sheep-farmer whom the Borg menaced with massive fines because, They said, he had more stock on his land than the arbitrarily low permitted maximum. They had double-counted his lambs, math not being a strong point with the hive mind. In any event, that farmer had plenty of feed for his stock, which were in magnificent condition.
The Borg wrote ordering the farmer to reduce his stockholding. He complained to a senior administrator (Locutus of Borg, perhaps). Eventually They climbed down – but without any apology. Instead, an official, furious at having been caught out in yet another error, told the farmer They would now arrange a forced sale of his farm.
Many other tales, such as the story of the prawn-farmer and the bogus koala claw-marks, will have to wait for another time. But the Borg felt the lash of the Viscount’s tongue. Towards the end of my visit to South Australia, they began turning up at my speaker meetings and muttering angrily to Themselves at the back.
No doubt Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the useless United Nations, is delighted that his willing agents at the Natural Resources Management Borg are making the corrupt U.N. and its environmentally destructive Agenda 21 program even more hated than it already is.
Time to arrange a forced sale of the U.N.’s lavish New York HQ and send its pampered officials to do some real work on Australian farms. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Let us convert the U.N. building to fancy apartments for the rich and famous. I shall take the penthouse.
Meanwhile, may the Natural Resources Management Borg and all their works wither and perish in the drought Their mad policies have needlessly created, and may Lord Monckton and his vigorous progeny thrive not merely ad multos annos but usque in saeculum. Make it so!
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The medium to long term solution is to make the politicians accountable, not just in blank cheque elections every three or four years. It’s to make them accountable 24/7 by empowering the people. The only way to do this is by massive pressure on the politicians: http://www.cando.org.au
“climateace says:
September 4, 2013 at 10:44 pm”
Don’t worry, soon all the green waste in Aus will be put to better use.
Beware the Borgan (Bogan) Climateace who isn’t! Often exposed on Joanne Nova, tries to be sheepish with a woolly cloak that doesn’t disguise the wolf underneath, probably a paid associate of Flannery and Karoly, and if we have any luck looking for a new lobby job after Saturday!!
KB
You sound like someone should name a bull after you as well.
Seven wrong out of seven is pretty thorough:
(1) Not a bogan but I did have a ute once.
(2) Have heard Nova’s name but that would be about that.
(3) Have a few cattle on some of the best flats in Australia, right next to a permanent river and with a handy lot of megs in secure water rights; if I was into sheep it would be fat lambs. No wolves our way. If there were we would shoot them.
(4) Independent financially.
(5) Have never met Flannery or Karoly and do not intend to.
(6) Don’t get paid by anybody but thanks for the implied compliment.
(7) I couldn’t care who wins on Saturday and will probably not vote. It is a crap election with crap choices. Rudd has had more positions on climate change than the kama sutra. Abbott intends to spend $3 billion on direct climate action when what he really thinks is that climate change is crap and carbon dioxide is weightless. We farmers have told him that his price per tonne of CO2 soil carbon sequestration is not enough to cover costs. He isn’t listening. Inspiring stuff?
You could always try sticking to the point: which is that Lord Monckton does not get farming in Australia, and is out of his depth when he thinks it is amusing that a famer has called a bull after him. Down our way them would be fighting words.
“climateace says:
September 5, 2013 at 3:26 am”
Don’t see you misquoting Gillard or Rudd, only Abbott. What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”. In this respect Abbott is completely correct. Is it OK for Gillard to call CO2 carbon pollution? Weather he made a mistake about some of the physical properties of CO2 is, largely, a distraction. When have you known a politician to be 100% reliably correct about everything, especially science? The good thing about Abbotts direct action plan is that it can be abolished in an instant without the need to repeal any legislation. Given the LNP will redirect the $10bil clean energy fund, $3bil is a bargain! I am quite happy for Abbott to abolish spending on things like “…the role of public art in climate change…” so go Abbott, go the LNP.
I think “you” farmers need to stop worrying about sucking at the taxpayer teat with regards to CO2 sequestration and start growing stuff.
Ed, ‘Mr’ Jones says: @ur momisugly September 4, 2013 at 4:26 pm
“Multinationals” are vastly more competent at producing things…”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No they are not. The reason is simple really and it is called the Peter Principle.
Smaller organizations especially those where the owner knows everyone working for him can not and will not tolerate ar$e-kissing incompetents for long. They just can not afford to. Small businesses are much more responsive to customer needs. (I am still, after five years, fighting with Tractor Supply about carrying more than one bag of sheep feed per week)
Small businesses drive job creation, growth
So what do multi-nationals have going for them? MONEY Money to starve out small competitors. Money for Campaign Donations and money to buy-off officials so they can form Cartels – monopolies/monopsonies.
An example is the little-publicized organization called the IPC– the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council, shortened to International Policy Council that was instrumental in getting the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture passed. This article is all about the results of that (self-snip) agreement. The Draft was written by the VP of Cargill (grain trador), Dan Amstutz, Clinton’s Senior Trade negotiator. The IPC is controlled by US-based agribusiness giants and so is the USDA/FDA. SEE: The Corporate-Government Revolting-Door (pun intended)
Another example of politics and money not innovation is Dwayne Orville Andreas, past CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Company(ADM). Perhaps America’s champion all-time campaign contributor.
So how is that working for you Mr. Andreas? ADM profits soar 550 percent as ethanol margins improve
The rest of the Ag Cartel did quite well too.
2007: Monsanto posts record $8.6B in sales: For the fourth consecutive year, Monsanto Co. reported record sales…
2009 Monsanto Posts Record Profits
April 2012: Monsanto posts record second quarter, sales jump 15 percent
Aug 2011 Cargill reported record profits of $4.24 billion, beating the previous high of $3.95 billion from 2007-08, and a 63% increase of the $2.6 billion it earned last year…
The bankers/financiers profited too. It is just the little people rioting and starvingin over 60 countries that bear the brunt of the manipulations. How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
This thread is about runaway government bureaucracy, leading to ‘soft tyranny’ (and not so soft, with armed EPA agents descending upon innocent Alaskan pan miners). The only counterweight is conservatism, which would rein in the leviathan, because true conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) are for limited, constitutional government.
It would take us far off-topic to pursue your assertions. Just remember that conservatives espouse Liberty, which of course ends when your fist hits the other guy’s nose—especially if the other guy is a helpless baby in the womb. And raising the minimum wage is the best way of ensuring entry-level unemployment. That too many people are stuck in entry-level jobs is a direct result of the stagnant economy. The solution is growth, and that requires that we get the government Borgocracies off our backs.
/Mr Lynn
[snip Gail – some of the content of this post has no business here – Anthony]
Ed Mertin says: @ur momisugly September 4, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Conservatives make no sense Mr. Lynn….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I would suggest BOTH of you read Jo Nova’s excellent article (by Dr Evans) Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control. followed by another article America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution: The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party…
Both articles make it clear we have a privileged ‘Aristocracy’ (Parasites) and the rest of us who are intent on gaining a stranglehold on the rest of us via red tape. If we do not figure that out FAST, we are headed back into a dark age of tyranny.
I also suggest reading DEMOCIDE: DEATH BY GOVERNMENT … 20th Century Democide, 169,202,000 Murdered …Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century.
THAT is what we should be concerned about because first world countries are not immune. Forget the false agendas thrown up to confuse the masses.
climateace says: @ur momisugly September 5, 2013 at 3:26 am
….if I was into sheep it would be fat lambs. No wolves our way. If there were we would shoot them….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Don’t try that here in the USA. You will get fined. We can’t even get rid of the @ur momisugly#$% coyotes! (A friend just last week had coyotes chew a large hole in the side of his horse without killing the poor thing.)
Don’t lump me in with that Ed Mertin. I’m with you, as is Mark Levin, who with his The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic may have the means for the Country Class to take back the USA and the Constitution from the Ruling Class and the soft tyranny of the government leviathan.
/Mr Lynn
Somehow, the vision of Lord Christopher Monckton sitting quietly watching Star Trek The Next Generation doesn’t fit for me.
J.H. says:
September 4, 2013 at 12:54 am
Propaganda you say? No, I saw the footage on Four Corners. How about somebody break your legs and then torture you to make you walk. Why don’t you think first, you heartless cow!
“Slacko says:
September 5, 2013 at 9:07 am”
One documentary. One cow. I saw it too, crewel in all its reality. There was no proof it was a beast from Australia.
Patrick
‘What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”’
Fair enough. My main point was, and is, that the pollies are all over the shop when it comes to CO2/climate change. What sort of prime minister has a policy to spend $3 billion of taxpayers money, including some of mine, on the basis of what he himself has publicly declared to be a crap argument?
Gail Combs
We get wolf derivatives, aka escaped pig dogs – let loose by seriously irresponsible pig hunters – causing whole areas to become impossible for sheep farming. The feral dogs come in and kill or maim serious numbers of sheep and lambs in a single night. Not pretty, not profitable and not a humane (sic) way of death.
The Borgs and farmers used to work together on this sort of stuff but increasingly the Borgs are telling farmers that it is their farm, they can fix the problem themselves. You would think that the rugged, anti-Agenda 21, self-reliant farmers would welcome this decision by the Borgs to leave farmers to their own devices. Uh, uh. What you get is loud farmer calls for more Borg activity, not less.
There are still some good Borg initiatives on the go right now with respect to feral dog control. Large scale regional aerial dog baiting is one of the more cost-effective Borg ways of protecting farmers from their hunting mates.
I notice that the usual paranoid crowd are chanting Agenda 21 and so on and so forth. This is pure ignorance. The fact of the matter is that nearly all on-farm environmental problems (aka they reduce productivity or increase costs to farmers) are regional or national problems.
I will give you an example. Australia has a huge artificial dryland salinity problem. While there are regional variations, the main driver was clearing of the inland slopes of the Great Dividing Range. This increased water recharge and mobilized squillions of tonnes of salt. The salt is basically carted to downslope discharge areas and into streams. Some of the latter have become too salty even for stock drinking water. The salinity affects farmland and it also affects urban infrastructure. (The salt basically breaks down clay particles so salted soil surface looks sort of it is a bit it has melted and flowed a little. It can be quite pretty to look at. Anyway, where dryland salinity discharge areas are urban or rural infrastructure places, house foundations break up, electricicy poles lean drunkenly, and roads break up, etc, etc.
The point is this: no single uber self-reliant, Agenda 21-fearing farmer who is getting dryland salt from his upslope farming neighbours can ever, ever hope to address his dryland salinity issues by himself. He needs Borgs, and he needs them very, very badly.
The history of Australian irrigation in the absence of regulation and Borg-enforcers follows a similar pattern. If you let individual upstream farmers sort it out they would be very inclined to use as much water as they could get their hands on and send silt and salt downstream. Farmers are, after all, individually competitive and I have certainly often seen situations where it is farmer v farmer rather than farmer v Borgs. If I have heard farmers say it once, I have heard it a thousand times: ‘farmers are their own worst enemies’.
Anyway, back to regional and even national farm environmental problems (erosion, salinity, weeds, ferals, soil acidification, etc, etc) – farmers make them and Borgs (and urban taxpayers’ money) are often called in by farming organisations to fix them.
One handy way for the Borgs to track down farmer water thieves, BTW, is that their farmer neighbours dob them in. After all, the water is being stolen from somebody else.
I finish with an anecdote.
Dethridge wheels are used to monitor irrigation water usage. The wheel is set in on-farm irrigation channels and rotates so many times per fixed volume of water. What water thieving farmers do is get a big stick and jam the wheel. The water continues to flow but the wheel has stopped measuring. Any way, the water bailiffs (aka Monckon’s dreaded Agenda 21 Borgs) started noticing all these sticks stuck in Dethridge wheels – in a treeless landscape. A couple of Borg busts later, and the farmer water thieves really got their act together. Dead european carp started getting themselves stuck in Dethridge wheels. Plenty of european carp in the channels. After all, they have pretty well taken over the native fish fauna in the entire Murray Darling Basin. Anyway, the farmer water thief carp lurk worked fairly well until a water bailiff Borg got a carp out of a Dethridge wheel which was still half-frozen.
BTW, I don’t like the conformation of Lord Monckton in the picture above. I like my herefords to have a straight back and the one above has a sway back – and at a very young age. Not a good look, IMHO, and I would keep my cows well clear of semen from that little fellow.
Climateace
I may have unwittingly conflated you with a poster of similar style and content (variation of blog name), therefore withdraw my last comment! Hopefully with a change of Government in Australia the one sided climate debate will also be put aside for a more mature and inclusive scientific approach.
All recent Australian governments (including the right-wing Howard Government) have temporarily banned live exports in the face of graphic cruelty footage. In the past 12 months the live trade industry has voluntarily temporarily banned live exports in the same situation itself without the need for government intervention. This shows that the industry is actually getting a handle on the risk-management side of things.
The basic message to us farmers is that the ovewhelmingly urbanized voters of Australia will not tolerate being confronted with graphic images of cruelty while they are eating their lamb chopes in front of the television during the evening news. By far the majority of Australian voters live in a few big coastal cities. Most of them have never been on or near a farm. I can tell you first hand that they just don’t get it. But here is the thing. If they don’t want animal cruelty, they will pester the Borgs until it stops. That’s what happens in democracies.
The live trade industry basically has two choices: it will either eliminate cruelty from the live trade supply chain or it will have to get used to sudden live trade bans.
Blaming the Borgs, as happened with Gillard but not with Howard (oddly enough), is very, very short-sighted. It is up to industry to makes sure that they have their anti-animal cruelty under 100% control woe to go.
If the industry does not get their act together, the voting population will push the Borgs into action. And if the cruelty keeps going the special animal pest groups (and they are very pesty) will get what they want – a total ban on live trade.
KenB
No worries. I am sure that it is a completely random event and well-within natural variations but we have had our hottest summer (and some very, very nasty bushfires) and we are also having our hottest winter since records began in the 1850’s and that during a neutral ENSO.
Fingers crossed?
Climateace
Of course I do not agree with your claim of hottest summer, that is merely smearing desert heat averaged across Australia, and conveniently enhanced by the up to three degrees that GISS wiped off old (Australian historical temperature records) meticulously gathered by the BoM and its early equivalent as LIG thermometer temperatures.
If you also look at the major urban cities, our modern population growth heat enhanced figures (UHI) temperatures add some three degrees or more in the case of Melbourne and Sydney and easily confirmed by a lay person by observing the change in temperature as you drive from the country into the urban environment.
Last summer was rather mild and certainly nothing out of the normal for most Australians that have lived through very hot summers in our past, it is ludicrous to claim tenths of a degree as records when the past LIG temperature records have been so vandalized by such “adjustments”.(always downwards to sensationalize modern records, by the way) to allow UHI enhanced modern “temperature readings” to appear hotter.
Tenths of a degree? gosh they should be 3 or four degrees hotter plus the addition of the acknowledged Century trend of under one degree celcius increase. So I call Bullsh*t on that claim.
If you want more confirmation the same sly adjusters at GISS stayed away from interfering with the CET temperature record in the UK – too many eyes watching that long temperature series to risk tampering with that one. Further read the official BoM history and obtain a copy of the 1913 BoM report and compare the heat, drought, flood records back into the early 1800’s and yes they did have Stevenson screens and standards to meet even before the BoM commenced its stewardship.
You sell a plausible line, but without merit when closely examined it is just propaganda and it is well beyond time to apply some rational thinking AND science to the test the Climate Change Commission (Borg hive) meme in Australia.
On the live cattle exports, farmers do all that they can in funding the best handling and humane methods of slaughter and we would rather carry this out in our own abattoirs, but we paid to have our best handling practices adopted in the destination countries. That some countries and cultures do not adopt that equipment and procedures is a matter for diplomacy and learning between those cultures, though I suspect that for most animal rights activists, even our best practices and methods of slaughter could be declared barbaric, when presented on television with a vegan slant and sensationalism.
KenB
I am happy to go with the BOM stuff any day of the week. I know some BOM people so I don’t suffer from denialistic paranoia about their so-called unscientific behaviour. It turns out they are pretty normal.
OTOH, you can go with whatever the doubt merchants scratch together. IMHO, at the end of the day, it will be the general lived experience that persuades people – not BOM, not the doubt merchants, and not climate fools like Rudd and Abbott. Wheat cockies in WA are walking off their farms. Not enough rain any more (and a few other problems, of course). The Goyder line is said to be on the move south. Maybe so, maybe not. A mate of mine who lives in the Top End and who drove down at Chrissie reckons that he could not believe how bloody hot it was. Another mate of mine has a mate who has some sort of fishing rights in South Australia. This mate’s mate reckons that the water has been hot and the fish are getting hard to find. Maybe, maybe not. And so it goes. I am pretty well resigned to the fact that people are going to get around to really wanting to stop AGW when it is too late for lots of things. As Ned Kelly would have said, ‘Such is life.’
I largely agree with your last paragraph. At the time, I thought it was foolish for the industry to try to pretend that the government was to blame when it was simply atrocious risk management by the live trade industry.
I note that various commentators on the topic above have failed to integrate two other salient features: one has been the disastrous abnormally dry Wet Season in a lot of Queensland cattle country. The need for producers to ride a season out by holding onto stock collided with a huge lack of feed both on the ground and transportable in. The other feature is the Indonesian Government’s strategy of becoming completely self-sufficient in beef production. Palm oil residue is the key to that. Australian live cattle exports to Indonesia are due to disappear as a matter of Indonesian Government policy. They are prepared to allow that to increase prices of beef in Indonesia. So, the only real question is when that will happen.
As noted above, those activists are determined to close down the live trade so the industry has to get it 100% right, IMHO.
I would add that if the sheep industry doesn’t do something serious about mulesing soon they are in for a hammering as well. And yes, I know all about blowfly strike – I have seen it plenty of times. But as I said above, most Australian voters have never been on a farm in their lives.
Many thanks to Lord Monckton for another excellent post!
Here in the Borg-occupied Italy, EVERY kind of water has been included, by law, in the Proprierty of the Governement.
You have to ask a permission not only for drilling a well (here in the Turin’s Province, if you’re a farmer you need about 18 months of time to have it, after a long bureaucratic nightmare), but also for just to collect the rain water falling over your piece of land.
And once you’ve got the permission, you have to pay a tax on it, in both cases!
“We can fine you for shifting a rock.”
Well, here in the Borg-occupied Italy this can be true in many places, thanks to our “landscape protection law”… Or, at least, you have to get a permission before you shift the rock, submitting a “landscape impact assessment” written by a professional architect and supported by photoshops illustrating the future view of that landscape after you shift that rock…
climateace says:
September 5, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Patrick
‘What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”’
Fair enough. My main point was, and is, that the pollies are all over the shop when it comes to CO2/climate change. What sort of prime minister has a policy to spend $3 billion of taxpayers money, including some of mine, on the basis of what he himself has publicly declared to be a crap argument?
Good point. When questioned about this he pointed out that the scientists disagreed as to the cause of global warming and on the recent 7.30 ABC report he thinks that the human race ‘contributes to emissions’, that cause global warming.
He thinks that it is possible to reduce emissions without taxes or trading schemes, but to do it by technological innovation. He used the example of a trucking company that bought more efficient trucks.
He also wants to plant trees and regenerate farmland, laudable aims and cheaper than offered by other parties.
The beauty of this site is that it actually discusses the causes of climate and seeks an understanding.
Hopefully this will inform all politicians and those of goodwill.
Lewis
I take it you are being party partisan rather than cool and considered when it comes to policy analysis.
(1) CSIRO says the soil carbon sequestration outcomes are far too uncertain to enable good measurements of the outcomes.
(2) Farmers say that the proposed payment in Abbott’s policy per tonne of sequestered carbon is not enough to make it worthwhile for them.
(3) The tree planting was to have been done only on public land because the Nationals hate trees being planted on good farmland (given the various tax break rorts of tree-planting companies and the somewhat shocking consequences for investors, the Nationals have a point). The trouble with planting the trees on public land is that there is simply not enough public land of silvicultural quality available for the quantum of trees promised